Afterword Timelines in myth are often confusing and inconsistent, especially when it comes to the heroes. According to Euripides, for example, Heracles kills his first wife Megara after his Twelfth Labour, whereas in most tellings of the myth the Labours are set for him specifically as a punishment for that crime. In Shakespeare, and other versions, Theseus is seen to have gone on to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, who has surely been killed by Heracles during his Ninth Labour? Some heroes are listed as Argonauts and participants in the Calydonian Hunt after they have been killed or before they could possibly have been born. Myth is not history. Variant tellings and narrative lines are inevitable. I have tried where possible to give some overarching shape to the stories of the heroes whose lives and deaths I have told here, but chronological incongruities are bound to make themselves manifest. Apollodorus’s Bibliotheca (Library) is a major source for all Greek myth, though he is often at variance with Hesiod and Homer. Apollonius Rhodius wrote the Argonautica, from which most of the details of Jason’s great voyage in search of the Golden Fleece are derived. The Roman writers Hyginus and Ovid embroider and elaborate in their way, and the travellers and geographers Pausanias and Strabo in theirs. The heroes, however, more than the gods, nymphs or other mortals, live on in the works of the three great Athenian tragedians, EURIPIDES, AESCHYLUS and SOPHOCLES. They embellish and alter the myths, it is true, but as playwrights their interest lay in dramatic truth and a focus on characters in crisis. Sophocles’ Theban Cycle is the source for the most commonly told versions of the tragic story of Oedipus and his family. Euripides enters the hearth and home of Jason, Theseus and Heracles, and concentrates on the women in their lives. Aeschylus comes into his own later, outside the parameters of this volume. I have plundered a great deal from all three of these great contemporaries and rivals. As with Mythos, I have tried to tell the stories without offering explanations or interpretations. Myth is ripe for interpretation and I hope you often find yourself putting the book down and speculating on what the Greeks meant (or thought they meant) by Chrysaor and Pegasus bursting from the severed neck of Medusa, or how they distinguished between the Harpies, the birds from the Isle of Ares and the Stymphalian birds. Myths are not crossword puzzles or allegories with single meanings and answers. Fate, necessity, cause and blame are endlessly mixed in these stories as they are in our lives. They were no more soluble to the Greeks than they are to us. There are those who like to think that many myths are pearls built up around grains of fact. In the past, even in antiquity, mythographers regularly attempted to trace almost all mythic stories back to some actual, historical truth. This is sometimes called Euhemerism or the historical theory of mythology. It is true that archaeology has shown that a Troy really existed, and a Mycenae. Bronze Age and Minoan wall paintings in Crete show bull-leaping and a maze-like structure that suggests the reality of the Labyrinth. Centaurs and Amazons are seen as Greek explanations for the arrival from the east of horses and their archer riders. Another good example of Euhemerism is the idea that the Chimera defeated by Bellerophon was in fact the pirate ship of Cheimarrhus with its lion’s figurehead for a prow and serpent for a sternpost. There are plenty of opportunities for that kind of interpretation as well as for more metaphysical and psychological speculation too. Carl Jung described myths as the product of our ‘collective unconscious’. Joseph Campbell put it another way and called them ‘public dreams’.fn1 Oneiromancy, the interpretation of dreams, is free, fun and harmless, but difficult to prove in the real world. Some explanations of the ‘meaning’ of myths may convince you, some may not. It is an open field in which anyone can till and harvest. Scholars and mythographers are interested in what is known as ‘double determination’, the tendency of poets, playwrights and other authors to attribute agency and causality to both the inner person and an outer influence, a god or an oracle, for example. If Athena ‘whispers in your ear’, is it just a poetical way of saying that a clever thought has struck you, or did the goddess really speak? If someone falls in love, is it always the work of Aphrodite or Eros? When we are intoxicated or frenzied are we driven by Dionysus? Did Heracles suffer from a hallucination and seizure or did Hera send a delusional fit to him? Did Apollo send plague arrows into Troy or was it simply that disease broke out in the city? When an oracle tells a king that a son or grandson will kill him, is that perhaps an external expression of the internal fear of patricidal overthrow that many rulers suffer from? Authors will say to this day that the Muse has abandoned them when what they really mean is that they are suffering from writer’s block. The further along the timeline of Greek myth we go from the founding of Olympus to the end of the Trojan War, and humanity begins to take centre stage from the immortals, the more difficult it is to be sure. Greeks of the historical age would still write of Ares giving them courage or Apollo inspiring them when it is clear that they did not mean it literally. It is possible to tell many of the stories – the torments and Labours of Heracles, for example – with almost no reference to the gods. When the sources write that Apollo gave the young hero bows and arrows, is that not a way of saying Heracles grew up to be a talented archer? Athena needn’t have taught the
Argo’s helmsmen Ancaeuss and Tiphys how to manage rigging and sails, surely it is enough to believe that they were wise and handy in their use of them? Nor need she have manifested herself and given Heracles a rattle when he tried to rid the Stymphalian Marshes of those smelly birds – maybe he was smart enough to think of it himself? Let’s face it, even today we cannot understand or explain much of what drives us. Take love, for example. To say ‘she fell in love’ is to describe a mystery. One might as well say ‘Eros pierced her heart with his arrow’ as ‘gametes fizzed, hormones seethed, psychological affinities and sexual connections were made’ … the gods in Greek myth represent human motives and drives that are still mysterious to us. Might as well call them a god as an impulse or a complex. To personify them is a rather smart way – not of managing them perhaps, but of giving shape, dimensions and character to the uncontrollable and unfathomable forces that control us. Do ‘superego’ and ‘id’ reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behaviouralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science. Myth can be a kind of human algebra which makes it easier to manipulate truths about ourselves. Symbols and rituals are not toys and games to be dispensed with on our arrival at adulthood, they are tools we will always need. They complement our scientific impulse, they do not stand in opposition to it. As with the interpretation of myths, double determination – the attribution of inner and outer influence – is as much a matter of preference as anything else. Some love to see the gods appear, interfere and direct, others are happier following humans doing their thing with the minimum of divine intervention. The Muses whisper in my ear and tell me I am done.